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Full Chain Games Series 2: "Why do you like Full Chain Games?"

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"The top form of the open world, the next piece into the steps of God."

Full Chain Game Series: Why Do You Like Full Chain Games?

Original article by Kaspar Chen

This is not so much a serious research paper as an essay. There are not too many analyses, citations and data. It is pure green thinking and subjective opinion under the limitation of my own experience. When leaving traces of my thoughts, I hope it can be used to introduce jade.

"Why do you like full-chain games?"

A lot of people have asked me this question, and the first time I was asked, my mind went blank, as if I couldn't figure it out myself, so I had to improvise some basic concepts about interoperability, about openness, about permanent storage on the chain, about fairness, and so on -- features that can be applied to any blockchain project. Because at the end of the day, that's what blockchain is all about.

When I got home, I thought about it more carefully, and in order to better deal with it, I came up with more assumptions about the game scene, about how these features would be presented, about how these features would change the experience, about how these features would bring about larger changes in philosophy and philosophy, which has been my answer many times since.

These are the answers I've distilled to this question, and they may be true, but are they really what I'm excited about and excited about?

This self-directed interrogation made me silently delete the answers I had written before, forcing me to review, think and feel again. I found that the feeling of excitement was indeed real, but I still could not answer what it was, only some fragments, flashing fluorescence in my chaotic world of thoughts.

碎片 1：开放世界的魅力与逻辑

Have you ever played Zelda? Are you attracted to it? Why?

My time on the mainland of Helaru was a unique one of all my life experiences, where I spent a lot of time frying fish, riding horses, cooking, exploring and wandering around, making ice on the sea over and over again to explore mysterious and unknown islands, only to be stripped naked as soon as I got there... The freedom to transcend reality made me feel like I could really do anything in this strange world. With no levels, no automatic pathfinding, no levels or skill points, it felt like I was actually living in it and experiencing all sorts of adventures, and the free yet natural experience made me truly experience the open world.

But there's an underlying logic that's very different from most games. Unlike most linear narrative, level and quest driven models, Zelda's underlying model is a system - and rule-driven model.

If we compare Assassin's Creed with the same high degree of freedom (no matter what), can Assassin's Creed really be considered an open world? At its core, it's a single-threaded narrative game made up of levels and missions, and despite the magnificently designed level Settings, the player is held down from start to finish by following the path that was set in the game's development. Typically, you can't move to the next area until the current area completes the quest, which leads you to the next chapter.

And when we go back to Zelda, the ultimate task of the game has been given to you from the very beginning: kill. It's up to the player to decide how and when to do it. It's a bit like if I offered you $10 to buy me something to eat, the former model would be to tell you to walk down the road to a 711, pick up a sandwich from the shelf, pay the clerk for it, and bring it back to me, possibly with a GPS finder.

The latter model is, I want the food, you buy it, steal it, rob it, make it, sandwich or skewer it, I want the food. In this mode, it is difficult to predict player behavior and movement, so designing an organic ecosystem is the core problem and challenge.

Zelda's approach is to create world rules and systems that interact with each other to achieve a natural and free world ecology.

In Zelda, we can find that the weather is not just a single scene, but a set of system, which is linked with the environment system and equipment system through the element system. When it rains, the rain is water, which will put out the campfire of the fire property, but also make the characters wet and attached to the water property, which conducts electricity, and lightning will hit the characters when there is thunder.

Within these systems and rules, no matter what the player does, it doesn't hurt the experience of the game, because everything that follows the rules of nature is natural, which is what I think is the strongest thing about Zelda, and what I think the open world should look like.

碎片 2：全链上世界的「规则」

So let's go back to full-chain, why do full-chain, or what can be opened on full-chain.

In the previous article.From the Dark Forest and Loot, A Glimpse into the Apex of Chain Play Form: Full Chain Play In fact, blockchain itself can be regarded as an open world. Interoperability and composability mean that the behaviors of players are difficult to be predicted. Therefore, it can be seen that games like Dark Forest also adopt the rules of the universe and allow players to play within the framework of rules. While its rules are relatively thin compared to the full open world, it has achieved a lot (people participating, people contributing, people building, constant thinking, constant discussion, repetition and learning, which I think is a very high achievement for a game), And the emergence of Influence with richer content also makes us see more possibilities.

So as a gamer, what really appeals to me about full-chain games, or what blockchain can give to games, is the greater freedom of rule-making and the possibility of rule combinations that can create an open world with greater rights and freedom for players.

In previous games, the first level game was to follow the player's head all the way; Until now, RPGS or semi-open world games have given the player freedom to explore and manipulate within the level; Open world games like Zelda allow the player complete freedom to live within the rules of the world naturally. The next level of authority is equal rights with game developers, and thus the ability to create and compose rules.

With this understanding, moving on to Zelda's scenario, perhaps I could create an "Outrageous Blacksmith" contract, where the rules call on the values of materials in the main world, and then combine midjourney to allow players the freedom to craft fantasy weapons. Players can craft a 40m golden broadsword, but it might turn out to be too heavy, The energy bar runs out as soon as the player lifts it, and the gold's hardness is low, making the weapon's attack low. This rules-driven randomness allows everything to be natural and self-consistent, and the experience goes from something that can only be set by the developer to something that can be created by myself as a player.

As a species of human, it always wants to be a god, but how to define God? We often say "Creator". On some level, God may be a role with "unlimited creation right".

碎片 3：昔日的 MOD 荣光

Experienced gamers may at this point question whether mods have already achieved this in terms of enhancing the experience through expansions and combinations, whether it was in the early days of CS or GTA or the Elder Scrolls, there is a thriving ecosystem of mods.

But the MOD is still in a more awkward situation, on the one hand, the current MOD is mainly single-player games, which is mainly through modifying the local game resource pack to achieve experience enhancement, while the core game resources of multiplayer online games are often not placed in the local client, which means that players can only self-indulge or cloud self-indulge, but not together. Even in some multiplayer online games, it is only in the form of plug-ins or plugins that are peripheral to the game logic.

On the other hand, because it involves the cracking and re-encoding of game resources, the requirements for MOD makers are very high, and it is basically impossible for most players to achieve the operation, so the ecology of MOD can still be said to be in a minority state.

But it is precisely because even in this environment, the MOD still has a strong growth, also gives me more confidence in the whole chain of games. The full chain of games can achieve, is every MOD players and developers have been looking forward to, at the same time will be given a larger, broader space to play.

所以，为什么看好全链上游戏？

In addition to the anticipation and excitement of being a player, there is also an underlying trend to be observed from an investor's perspective.

This is quite similar to the e-sports culture in China in the early years. In the early days, e-sports was a culture hardly recognized by the mainstream society. At that time, the games were mostly played by lol, but today, with more open thinking and the rise of the former young generation, we can see that e-sports has become a part of the mainstream culture.

Comparing the possibilities of the full chain game experience to the current development of the MOD industry in a closed environment points to the tremendous power behind it. We may not know how big a wave it will be, but I believe it will become a destination for open world players and MOD enthusiasts alike. It's definitely going to be the top form in the open world.

着眼当下

After a lot of open world thinking, we can look back and see that most full-chain games are basically turn-based games, whether it's the Dark Forest, the ancestor of the game, More recently, Sky Strife from Lattie, Dark Sea from 0xHank, Word3 from SmallBrain, Museum Heist from Teratation Lab are all turn-based games. Muddy Forest, Loot Realm, Treaty, Infulence, etc. of open RTS have not yet shown their open combination characteristics, so how can these games be evaluated?

As an engineering background, I am used to thinking and coping with problems in an experimental mode in my daily life, and experiments often require me to go through the process of "Finding problems - - gt; proposing hypotheses - - gt; designing experiments - - gt; conducting experiments - - gt; obtaining results - - gt; analyzing conclusions - - gt; verifying hypotheses - - gt;". Find new problems "and so on.

While full-chain games are obviously still in the experimental phase of the feasibility hypothesis, the purpose of this phase is to prove that games can be played in full-chain mode, so we can see the results so far are encouraging. Expanding the genre and adding depth to the game will be an issue for the next round, and we need to give it some time.

Many of today's games may be only temporary experiments, or they may be lost to history in the future, but they are the foundation stones, and the creators behind them will start a new era with a deeper understanding, knowledge, and will.

So, let's look forward to the future together, looking forward to the piece of stone that will rise, leading to "God".